Not as funny now. It's gonna be more serious.

Thanks for that intro, Jeff, Elena. Thank you for being here on this session, how to not suck at marketing. I was gonna do an intro also.

Billy did that. I want to add that Jeff literally wrote the book, how to not suck at marketing.

And Alina also, more than any other per CEO, co CEO, CMO does not suck at marketing. So two better people cannot be leading this session. It's an honor to be asking them some questions. So we'll tee it up. Any intro statements from you guys on kind of the state of marketing right now in twenty twenty four after some of the talks we heard earlier?

I'm in Atlanta today. And, actually, I I live in Brooklyn, so I'm not from here, but I worked here for about a year. And the peach tree, street gives me back all the feelings.

I'm glad to be, back here. And my hope is that by creating these, conversations together now with Rob on here on the panel, but later as as we are back in with you in the crowd, we can all learn together of how not to suck at marketing because my best learnings were from conversations like at this type of events, learning how to be more myself, learning how to create different tactics that I might have not thought about. So my hope is for today that this kind of conversation suck at marketing continues outside of this panel in in one on one conversation, and I can be of service outside of it too.

Same question, Ian.

Yeah. I just wanna start is this on?

You guys hear it? I have a little bit of a bone to pick with the southbound team.

If you guys saw in the promotion, there were these bobbleheads.

And Alina's bobblehead, she looks like badass Superwoman character.

My bobblehead, if you look, it looks like Doctor. Evil with glasses.

I kinda want I want a redo on the bobble head.

I I can make that that was exclusively me, really my wife for that. But, I thought you looked pretty good. But, yeah, that's that's a fair that's a fair complaint.

If I have another person come up to me and they're like, are you Professor G? Scott Galloway.

I didn't even bring him on. I look like Doctor. Spock in an orange suit. It's pretty bad.

But, you know, I read this book, How Not to Suck at Marketing, And it was interesting. It was published in twenty one.

And that was kind of a time when I think, you know, we were just I was in business. We were like flush with leads, and everything was working.

And as a marketer, I felt really good. Like, hey. I, you know, I know how to do this really well. I know how to not suck at marketing.

And then we entered twenty twenty two.

And it was like a different world. And I think that's the thing I've realized is that the shifts that have happened between sort of like twenty one eighteen to twenty one and then twenty two to to present day are are really significant in the the marketing category.

And, it it's hard.

But it's I think I think the reality is that it's always been hard. Hard. Just we were kind of fooled that we were smarter than we are in sort of eighteen to twenty one.

And now we're sort of back to normal, where we just have to be super smart. We have to be really, really efficient with our resources.

And I think the biggest thing for marketers is that you're drawing that straight line between what you are doing as a marketing department and not just what I would call vanity metrics around website traffic or, total leads, but a direct line between what you're doing and then real impact on the business as measured by pipeline and revenue?

Yeah. It's a good segue to our first question, which are I guess you could kinda compare this to twenty twenty one or a couple years ago when you wrote the book. Lenny, you can do the same. But what are what are some of the principles great marketing organization or leader specifically because you just said draw in a straight line to revenue? That's that's a question for both of you.

I'll, I'll take that question. So besides obvious the obvious, which is tying back actions with pipeline, which is not always easy to do.

You might have a social post that goes viral, and you have direct reporting and you don't have that way to directly attribute.

It's the ability to know my my main mantra is that a great marketer is someone who knows how to draw attention to the product, to the service in a way that converts, in a way that helps others take take action. And that's really, really hard. And one of the main reasons why it's really hard to get attention is because on digital and social, we're inundated at all times and so are audiences.

And we don't want to stand out for the wrong reasons.

We don't want to draw attention, with negative with negativity. And yet, you see that on social. That's what attracts people. Like, the drama attracts people and and and the conflict attracts people.

And yet, as a business, you you don't want to be associated with that. So the best way to do that, to draw attention, is by providing value again and again and again and again and again. And we repeat the same message until we're blue in the face.

However, that message can only work if it gets our audience to take action. And getting audience to take action is really hard because most people are a lot more comfortable with the status quo. They're a lot more comfortable with not taking action. It's safer. We're so much safer if we don't buy software, we don't get fired.

And the ability to influence others and impact others to take action, it's a beautiful gift. If you have that skill set, it's a beautiful gift. We see it in politicians.

In certain people. So my journey to learn to, impact others in a positive way by teaching others how that action might have a positive impact. It's a it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful journey because it doesn't only aid for the company that we're working on or the product that we're selling for, but it aids in other parts of our biz of our life as well. We might want to do fundraise or we might want to, impact a cause that's deeply important to us like, climate change or or something else that we care deeply about. So the better we become at getting people to take action on positive things, the better we can become together.

You're right. That is hard. Jeff, anything to add on on that?

Yeah. I I think the other side of that is being able to to raise awareness, interest, get people in, but actually do it much more efficiently than we've done it in the past.

And I mean, I I've been at companies where, you know, I'm the senior marketer and I hire a team of marketers. And then they're all like, okay. I need to go get my agencies. And then you're flushed with, all this Martech.

And the bloat, like, in marketing departments is real. And I think you have to constantly ask yourself, do I need this tool? Do I need these people?

Do I need this agency to get the work done?

And maybe you do and maybe you can look at each thing you're doing and all these tools and all these agencies and all these people and say, yeah, they're they are providing an ROI.

But for the most part, and I think some of us went through this during COVID where you had to kinda look at everything you were spending money on, and you really had to get, you know, get a lot leaner than companies had in the past. At least, you know, the company I was at at the time, we had to get much leaner.

But that was a good discipline. And now every year, I'm looking at everything we're doing. I'm saying, are we really should we keep investing in this tool? Does that make sense for the business? So I think the the best marketers going forward are, yes, the ones that are gonna attract attention to the business, but also are gonna do it in the most efficient way possible.

Love that. So craft messaging that gets customers or prospects to convert and take action efficiently. That's if I could sum it up, that's what I heard. It's a good segue again to the next question. That was about organizations, business leaders, and we have a room full of those people here, but also some individual contributors as as well. So, if you kinda parse that down into what people in in an IC role can do or what principles they should follow to have an impact, what would you say there?

What percentage of, you are on marketing?

Marketing. How many of you individual contributors in the marketing team?

Okay. Sales?

Okay.

And founders or CEOs?

And what are the rest of you? Ops?

Yes? Ops?

Overhead.

Except, but not not Okay.

Alright. What can you do to be most effective?

So I have the privilege of being having been both in a marketing role and as a founder, and understanding how hard it is to create revenue for the business and and have an impact on the pipeline, and trying to explain to the CEO, how to, get to budget for a specific campaign and how to explain why certain results didn't happen that way.

And I can understand that one of the biggest challenge when you're in the marketing team to be able to drive those results is to convince your founder that certain things are worth it and also to make sure that they give attention to the marketing department in the same way that they might give to sales. A lot of times, I'm observing that the marketing department doesn't get as much attention.

And maybe it's because they think that, you might be in charge just for the printing of the t shirts or for the booth or for whatever, other, just tasks. They don't think of it as a the department that they can brainstorm and and create true value students to the work that you think it's most impactful. And to convince your founders or your bosses that something is worth, you have to be very convinced that it's gonna work and bring in the data, bring in the benchmark, show other companies that are doing it well. And the only way to do that is by doing a lot of networking to understand what some of your peers are doing that are that are that might have an impact or companies that are driving results in unconventional ways. So in our case, we only have three marketers. So talking about efficiency, I don't think you can get leaner than that. We use a lot of freelancers and and agencies to, brand.

Brand. And all good marketers know that brand is essential because you can't convert on outbound. You cannot your sales team cannot convert if people don't know of you. It's a lot easier if they do. So this, belief that I had that brand will work doesn't resonate with everybody. Not all founders get it and not all teams get it.

They think it's fluff.

So the ability to show that there are other companies that do that because they believe long term in the place that might not benefit short term. It's the way to go.

And how to be present on brand on all channels efficiency is tricky, but we will discuss today of how to do that.

Hopefully. That's one of the next questions. Yeah.

Yeah. I think for individual contributors, especially whether you are an individual contributor or you manage individual contributors, what is most important is is sort of expertise in the craft. I think, you really got to go deep. If you're an individual contributor, you're running say you're the person in charge of social media, or the person in charge of events, or the person in charge of, email marketing.

The expectation, I think for, for me as somebody who's managed a lot of ICs, is that you are the if you're running social media, you are the biggest social media nerd ever. You know everything about social platforms. You know exactly what time to post so you get the optimized results. And so for for ICs, I think, you know, knowing that, you're going, you have to go very deep on the craft.

Because what your leaders are looking for is is expertise that you kinda know what you're doing, and you're doing it very well. And hopefully that I don't have to worry about it as a leader. You know you're in trouble when, you know, the CEO of the business is coming asking you about like your social media posts. Like that like that are on the company page.

That's when you know you probably don't have an IC in who really understands social media at a at a very deep level. So, so that's the biggest thing as an IC is is really kind of honing in, getting all the certifications, and just really nerding out on the craft of of specifically what you're working on. And then probably the second part is, sort of trying to expand your portfolio so you're set up for growth. Because, not a lot of people wanna do just social media their whole career.

So you start kind of going deep on the craft, earning a lot of credibility that, hey, you're good at this one really specific thing, and then learning the other things as you go. And I think that's really the key for ICs to kind of grow their careers and grow into, you know, more broader marketing executive roles.

So be be convicted in your strategy or your beliefs upfront, have data to to back it up. If you have to convince a founder for budget or for approval for longer term strategy and then be an expert in one thing, almost the t shape, have depth and expertise and then have breadth also. That's excellent.

I'll go to Jeff first for this one. So every marketer loves a good trend. I've seen stuff that was almost published as a meme before I knew what it was. As far as tactics are concerned or trends, what are some tactics that have worked in marketing recently? So some recently effective tactics.

So what's what's been interesting recently, and we've all you know, Andy's session about AI was really interesting. I think every marketer now is just scrambling to figure out AI. How do I use it in my team? How do we use it in the company?

I've seen lots of different examples of it being used well and and not well. And I'll probably lean in on what's not working with AI right now. Like, what's great about AI? It's really easy to create a blog post.

So now you have this, like, proliferation of total crap blog posts out there that every company is putting out because it's not going through sort of a filter where people are looking at it and saying, like, is this really good content? And maybe the content's gonna work for SEO, but then, you know, the funny thing about it, it's like, if you get people to a page that ranks well for SEO but the content is crap, what does that say about your brand? So I I really think, you know, there's gotta be this kind of middle ground in companies now where, yes, you want to have, you know, AI is great.

You can pump out a ton of content. But you still have to put the safeguards around it so you're not just pumping out total crap that's going to really kind of make your brand look bad. And and that's where I think there's a lot of risk, for content marketers right now, is that they're leaning too hard, maybe, on the AI tools. And they're not leaning as much on the internal expertise of people at the company.

And so I I think I think we're gonna have kind of a reckoning pretty soon where, you know, the experts in the company and the product or the customer are just gonna get sick of seeing terrible content out in the wild. And it's gonna get reined in to some extent. So so I think that's a really interesting trend. I'm I'm a big believer that AI can help supercharge great messaging. But if the messaging isn't greater, you're gonna be in trouble, and it's gonna put your brand in trouble.

So I think I think everyone's gotta really go deep on AI right now, but I also think everyone's gotta be really careful with AI.

I saw something just to interject really quickly where it was an interview and the speaker said AI is Interfering with your speech.

AI is I can't I'm not gonna say what I was gonna say about AI.

But so the the primary function of AI as it stands now, and Andy was saying that he was, there's some there's a lot of stuff out there that doesn't work as well. But AI is primarily for reducing the distance, between you and an answer to something. So, if you're gonna edit or revise and have, like, a and type out five thousand words, it needs there needs to be some revisions. Same question to you. Tactics for you or for Chili Piper that been working lately or like Jeff said that have not been working?

I'm, because I'm the technical cofounder at Chili Piper, I'm I'm completely obsessed with AI, and I spend time by myself building agents and a lot of agents to optimize our efficiency. So I'm definitely spending a lot of of my mind on it. However, the tactics that are most efficient for us are the same tactics that have been effective from day one and they're the ones that, we're continuing to employ and and we'll double down on them, which is and then ties back to a discussion that we had earlier. When I post something from the Chili Piper company account, the kind of engagement that I get is, but when I post something by myself, the engagement is a lot more amplified because it comes through a human voice.

And the human at at the beginning of the company, I I didn't feel comfortable of posting because, as a technical cofounder, I would have rather hide hidden somewhere and not have to talk to people. Now I've become comfortable with it because the company, creation creating a company makes you feel uncomfortable and gets outside of your, of your fears.

But even from the beginning, I would, work with people who are influential in my space. So one of my first customer, is someone that you might be familiar with, which is Kevin Dorsey. He has a lot of presence online. And and so for that time, he didn't he was not as famous, but I could tell that when he would command the room, like, when he would enter an event like that, people would be drawn into it. And I would go to every as in every physical event where my persona was and see who were people drawn into. B2B influencers was not the thing, but I knew that people in the ecosystems are the ones who are going to make makes most impact. So I will seek for those voices to be my first customers and my evangelists.

And there's no better person to talk about your purse to talk about your product than your users, those who really love you. And amplification of those users, those people that are trusted in your ecosystem is really hard unless your product delivers value, of course.

Once you find those influencers, you constantly seek those notes that are gonna have the best impact in in there and help them with their goals. Sometimes it's, their goal is to have their message to be known. Sometimes their goal is to partner with certain people. Sometimes their goal is just to speak at events. Whatever the goal is, you go and you find it and then you amplify them to help them speak about your product eventually, if they do.

And I'm noticing that as marketers, the more time we focus on that, the more we help the influencers in our space, the more impact we can have. They get a lot more credibility if they talk about us than I can ever do by myself because I'm gonna just sound biased. My company account is gonna sound biased. But my evangelist, they won't because they won't talk about me unless it makes them look good.

It does. So there's a proliferation with AI of a lot of smaller I've noticed this on LinkedIn, a lot of smaller twenty, thirty follower pages everywhere that almost seek to be commenting and having vanity metrics for engagement that kinda contributes to that where, you're not sure who's on the other end of the account. So there's less, magnetism or less attraction to that. That ties into this. If you were to predict key trend, we just talked about tactics and trends that are working or not working this year. What are some key trends in twenty twenty five that are gonna be effective or not as effective in marketing?

This might be this is a I might be totally wrong here, but I I actually think, that there's there's gonna be a resurgence of in person in a big way, and it's gonna be a much more important part of, marketing programs than probably we've seen over the last five years. It's been really trendy to to say as a CMO, oh, we're cutting events.

Like, or that's been a a big theme.

And it probably depends on your category, because some categories events may not be as effective, or they just might be cost prohibitive for some companies. But what I've seen, So So if you think about if anyone here works at a nonprofit, or you know people in nonprofits, it's a very face to face kind of industry.

And so, we're actually increasing spend in in person and decreasing in some of the digital channels where we're not seeing as much return.

And we're doing more like, hey, let's get out into the market. Let's do our own road show. And we feel pretty good about those decisions. So I think as much as we're excited about digital and all the capabilities of AI, we're kind of maybe going a little bit old school, going back you know, getting bringing influencers with us to the in person events so they can talk to prospects that we get there. So I I really I'm really much more bullish on events, maybe than a lot of people I hear online talking about events. I think I think events are gonna kinda make a big resurgence, and, you're gonna see some of those budgets maybe that are in MarTech Bloat or or Google AdWords coming out of those channels and going back to in person.

Yeah. With with the, rise in AI and the usage of I feel like there's a deficit in authenticity, which I which specifically for nonprofits is what you're talking about. Same question to you. Tactics trends that are gonna be effective in twenty twenty five.

Talking about old school, I love the cassette tapes.

I am, definitely agreeing with you, Jeff.

People are gonna become inundated on the digital front. They're gonna start lacking trust that they're gonna stop trusting the information that they're getting, especially now that we see these AI avatars that look kind of weird and the content is kind of weird and everything's kind of weird online.

Everybody's trying to get attention on topics that are just bringing us apart instead of together.

And we will be craving that togetherness, a lot more. And that can only happen in in local communities, and it can only happen in, in in, in person.

We're definitely doubling down on small hyper local events, that are bringing people that shares common interests and, that can network. Because it's not bringing a speaker is nice and and then I I enjoy being a speaker at events and I enjoy, putting them together.

But the biggest value for for the audience happens outside speaker. Right? All these connections that you're you're making here. And, by bringing value to your to your persona, that's how you can best to the ecosystem and pitches. They they they're gonna people are tuning them out. Whenever someone a speaker pitches their product, you you just can read through it.

So I'm bullish on human connections. That's what I'm bullish on twenty twenty five.

Same. We have a couple more minutes.

Like, AI was trying to get me again. I'm gonna ask this question in two different ways, the way it's written and a funny way that I'd like to ask, and you can take either one of these. I'll ask them both at the same time. Question says, how can marketing and sales collaborate better together? What I would ask is, are marketing and sales ever gonna get along? Ever gonna play nice? We'll go to Alina first on this one.

I love this topic because I'm observing more and more how blurry their lines are.

What sales can do now is very similar to what marketing can do because you can start personalizing a lot more. And the reality is that, when a salesperson has a conversation in person, they learn a lot more about messaging than you can ever do. Even with AB tests, you don't learn about the connection and the emotion behind what they're seeing.

And, the only way to get that kind of beautiful collaboration that can happen between, the two teams is to make sure that they share the same goal, which is bringing pipeline together, not having to fight about this came this way and this is the last touch, this is the first touch, this is, influenza.

I don't want to hear any of those arguments. What's really important is that we contribute to pipeline together, and the numbers are trending in the right direction, and we all bring what we can contribute because none of us is perfect. Like, I I I I've yet to found a a perfect marketer or a perfect salesperson, but we all have our own strength. And if we can all contribute together, then we can feel like we have the impact, and we can feel like we have an impact as a team.

Yeah. I I think I think that's exactly it. I mean, I it's funny. I I was in, I've been in all these in my career, tons of QBRs.

And, most of them go this way. The marketer gets up, shows website traffic, shows leads, drops the mic, you know, walks off, the whole marketing department cheers, the head of sales gets up, pipelines down, revenues down, we're not growing, I'm getting fire, no one's hitting quota.

And and that and that's a the like I've seen that movie so many times in my career. And so I was at I was at this company and, I was running marketing, and someone said, hey, let's give let's give Jeff a sales team. And I was like, what? I was like, I don't want a sales team because because then I have a quota and that would suck.

But but so I I had I had marketing and sales under me, and and I I said, alright. How am I gonna make this work? And I realized what I had to do is, like, okay. I had a marketing director and a sales manager, and I need them to talk every day.

And I need the marketing person to figure out, okay. Hey, the leads are really spammy today. What's going on? Oh, we turned on this campaign.

It must have produced spammy leads. Let me turn it off and reallocate into something that was higher performing. And the impact was optimization of your marketing dollars in real time with actual feedback from sales.

And and that shouldn't be like I mean, I think that's just being in a company. That's what you should do. But for some reason, we kind of get in these marketing and sales silos. So I think the biggest thing is having someone on either your sales, your marketing team, or both that are just committed to daily communication.

And like, I have a guy on my team now, he's amazing. And he actually, he used to run our BDR team, and now he's our head of demand gen. And all he does all day is inspect every lead that's coming in, making sure it's getting followed up on based on the SLA. And then taking the feedback if the leads are bad, and figuring out why they're bad and how to fix it. And if you're able to get that kind of collaboration between sales and marketing, you're effectively optimizing all of your resources and spend in real time. And that's gonna produce better results for the business.

It's gonna make you more efficient, more effective, and it's gonna improve the relationship between sales and marketing, which will lead to a happier company.

Sales and marketing talking. Matt Furman, wherever you are, I just book time with you every day, until the there there he is. One one last question. I know we're coming up on time here, and this is for the audience, to both of you. We'll we'll start with Alina first on this one. What's one thing that you recommend the audience do after this talk? One action they can take after this session.

I think it's the same advice that I gave, my team about two years ago, which is to practice again and again your muscle to tell stories.

It's such a hard skill. Telling a good compelling story that converse is such a hard you can try to manipulate Cajabi to tell you stories, you can start to prompt the hell out of it.

And it does to some extent, but the best stories are the ones that are personal and they're deep down to your personal experience. And those are the ones who are gonna resonate because people pay attention to people.

And learning how to tell personal stories is very hard.

Just to double down before you speak, Jeff. Dharmesh, in a in a post or in a a speech that he gave said if he could go back and learn anything other than than coding, he would learn to tell stories. He was replaced with that. So just double down on your your, what you just said, Jeff, for you.

So what should people do coming out of this? Yeah. Everyone should go to Amazon and Google or look up, how not to suck at marketing. And, if you find me if you buy it and you find me, I will, autograph it for you.

And and if I autograph it, it could be worth tens of dollars after they autograph it. So, but I think probably the biggest thing for this event is, meeting people who kind of do what you do at other companies. And then after the event, keeping in touch with them and going and trying to figure out what they're doing and sharing what you're doing and trying to, you know, learn from your peers. I I mean, I think, you know, the success I've had in my career has been built on a strong network that I have.

Like, Sangram spoke earlier today.

Sangram and I have been sharing ideas on marketing for years. Actually, Sangram helped me get one of my jobs.

And so it's it's like having a strong network starts with being at these kind of events, meeting people, sharing ideas, and keeping in touch. So that would be, you know, you're all lucky to be here. Thanks to RevPartners guys for putting together a great free event where the community could come. But take advantage. I mean, you know, meet as many people as you can, get contact information, follow-up after. Because I my guess is everyone in here is doing something pretty innovative in their companies that others could learn from. So it's all about getting that learning and then applying it back to your business.

Love that. I'm usually humorous, but this is real. What an honor to be able to be the one to ask you guys these questions. Thank you for coming and supporting today.

We'll turn it back. Give it up for Alina and Jeff. Yeah. Great job. Thanks, Alina and Jeff.